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A Glimpse of Heaven, Part One

by James Barringer  
9/16/2009 / Bible Studies

I decided, almost as soon as I started this book, that I was going to end by talking about eternity. To me, eternity is vastly underrated as a teaching in the church. I cling to the hope of Revelation 21 and 22, which talk about what eternity will be like, because that's the whole reason for everything we do. Salvation means nothing without talk of what we're saved from (sin, which we've talked about extensively already) and what we're saved into. We're saved into a lifetime of worship and praise and unconditional love here on earth, but we're also saved into the hope of an amazing eternal reward. Colossians 2 actually refers to the message of the gospel as "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Hope here does not mean wishful thinking, like "I hope I win the lottery," but rather a confident expectation of a better future. 2 Corinthians 5 makes reference to the Holy Spirit being a deposit, a down-payment, until we receive our full inheritance later on. The full inheritance, obviously, is our eternal reward, which is awesome almost beyond words.

This is what the whole Bible is building toward. Romans 8 says that creation is groaning under the weight of what sin has done to it. The earth and everything in it yearn for the day when God will have his final victory over the forces of sin, death, decay, pain, fear, uncertainty, disappointment, regret, bitterness, and failure. A thorough dissection of the end of Revelation will give us a better understanding of what God has in mind when he's talking about rebirth, and what exactly he is spending this lifetime preparing us for.

Oddly enough, though, my dissection of Revelation begins in 2 Peter. When God decides that the time has come, he's going to inaugurate eternity by completely destroying this current creation and making everything over again. 2 Peter 3 says, "That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat." Revelation 21 then picks up from this point by saying, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away." Passed away is right; God blew them up and melted them with fire. I think he does this just to put an exclamation mark on the history of the world. It shows that God is all about rebirth, from beginning to end. He took my dead heart, tore it out, and gave me one that was alive instead. Then he takes the dead world, which was crippled by sin and bears the memory of humanity's failure, and he says, "No more of this." He tears the universe apart and reconstructs it from scratch. Being born again is not just, as Jesus said, the way to enter the Kingdom of God. It's God's entire plan for all of creation every man, woman, and child, and even the earth and the galaxies themselves.

One thing that fascinated me about this verse is that God recreates new heavens and a new earth. The new earth is for humanity to live on, as you'll see momentarily. But why would he bother making new heavens? What's the point of having galaxies so far away that we won't be able to see them from our eternal home?

Isaiah 6 provides the answer. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty! The whole earth is full of his glory!" Not just the whole earth, even, but everything that has been made. Psalm 8 adds, "I consider your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you have set in place." Those things all exist to give us reason to worship God. When we see what God has made, we understand that only a really mighty God could have made them, and so we worship. So it will be in eternity as well. God's purpose with creation is not utilitarian; it exists to proclaim his glory, not merely to be used by us.

Now seems as good a time as any to address what the purpose for eternity is. The Westminster Catechism, a book of spiritual questions and answers dating from the 1700s, suggests, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." That's exactly accurate. Maybe you've never actually pondered the reason for eternity, which is why so many people have the misconception that we'll be lazily standing around singing praise songs to God for eternity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Singing music is only one (very poor) way to glorify God. There are innumerable other ways, which I'll point out to you as this chapter progresses, but that's what I want you to know. The point of eternity is to show our respect to God through everything that we do.

We have a difficult time glorifying God now, because of all the selfishness and other junk that trip us up when we try to live the right kind of life. Thankfully, it's not always going to be that way. When God recreates earth and the heavens, he's going to give us all brand new bodies, referred to as glorified or resurrection bodies. Then he's going to unleash us on this new earth.

This promise, of a new body for the resurrection, is something that the apostle Paul considered absolutely crucial to the Christian faith. He said, "If it's only for this life that we have hope, then we are to be pitied more than anyone else alive!" The hope of the next life was the thing that kept him going. Paul's life was pretty awful. He got beaten repeatedly, whipped, flogged, hunted down, chased out of cities, you name it. Following Jesus cost him everything. I think that explains why he was so eager for this new body, which had none of the flaws of his earthly body (most people think Paul was bow-legged and suffered from seizures) so that he could get on with experiencing life the way God had originally intended for it to be.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks extensively about this resurrection body. The main thing you should know is that it will be sinless. Eternity is where God fulfills his promise to conform you to the image of Christ. Do you remember last chapter, when I griped that Jesus was born with a new heart, which gave him an unfair advantage in loving people? We get the same thing in our resurrection bodies. In 1 Corinthians, Paul repeatedly refers to the resurrection body being "incorruptible." Sin is a corruption, a perversion, of what God originally had in mind when he created the world. He made the world and saw that it was good; sin turned it into something vastly different. God's entire purpose in annihilating all of creation and then recreating it brand new is to have things the way they were in the beginning, to return to the state where nothing separates God from his people. That starts in our hearts, which will be incorruptible. It is literally impossible for anything to corrupt them. We're locked in to an eternity of perfect relationship with God right from the start.

Have you ever made a list of things you wanted to ask God when you get to heaven? I want to know whether I've eaten an even or an odd number of M&Ms. I don't care about the actual number, really; I just want to know if it's even or odd. There are other things I want to understand, too, like how his sovereignty and my free will coexist, what his handwriting looked like (see Daniel 5 and John 8), how Jesus made the bread to feed thousands of people at a time, how his cooking tasted (see John 21), and many other things. In eternity, I will be able to understand those things, because of the perfection of my new heart. Shortly before he starts talking about the resurrection body, Paul spends the last half of 1 Corinthians 13 addressing this very idea. "Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror," he says; the things we think we understand about God and eternity are smudgy and vague. "But then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." There will be no more mysteries about God, who he is, and why he does the things he does. He will make those things known to us, so that we can have a relationship with him beyond anything we've ever imagined.

Now, if that part of the resurrection body has you excited, you might want to have a paper bag handy just in case you hyperventilate or throw up from awesomeness. The body itself will be vastly different from what we've always known. My examples in this section will chiefly come from Jesus' resurrection, when he appeared with a (partially) glorified body.

I don't know if you're aware just how much our current bodies are dependent on things other than God. We rely on food, or else we shut down. We rely on water or else we dehydrate and die. We need sleep or we get slap-happy and then go insane. We need oxygen or we suffocate. Really, our entire lives consist of ping-ponging between needs, trying to satisfy them. You structure your entire day around when you need to go to bed and wake up, and you schedule your waking time around the meals you have to eat. It's a very confining existence. You don't just have the freedom to wander off and do whatever you want to do, because your body will object and eventually die if you don't attend to it. We are, in essence, prisoners to those needs.

Yet the resurrection body will be totally dependent on God. Paul contrasts our new body, a "spiritual" body, with the one we have now, which is "natural." This means that the "natural" aspects of our body, including the sinful tendencies I talked about as well as the physical needs we have, will be no more. Our bodies will no longer generate power by burning the calories in food; rather, they will be supplied with power by God himself. Jesus, for instance, when God raised him from the dead, had no need of physical food. His glorified body was powered entirely by God instead. I don't mean that he wasn't able to eat; just that he didn't need to. In Luke 22, the disciples give him a piece of fish, which he eats to prove that he's really alive and not just a ghost. He was still quite capable of eating, but he wasn't forced to eat for sustenance the way you and I have to. When he ate, it was totally for enjoyment, and enjoying the things that God has put on earth to feed us is one way to glorify God.

There is also proof of this elsewhere in Scripture. Matthew 4 records Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days. This is, quite obviously, impossible for a human body. We become severely impaired after just three days without water, and we die after six days, but Jesus went more than nine times longer than this. Clearly he must have been receiving energy and sustenance from something other than food in other words, from God. He was hungry; Matthew says so, because his human (non-glorified) body was still engineered in a way that it required food, despite receiving God-power to keep him going during his fast. However, in a resurrection body, a spiritual body which is engineered not to need food, that same God-power that Jesus received during his fast will be more than sufficient to give us all the energy we require.

Just so you know what I mean when I say God-power, let me observe something. God has a lot of power, a limitless supply in fact, and he is continually expending it. He has enough power to create a universe from scratch, destroy that universe, and create another brand new one also from scratch. His power formed every planet, star, comet, asteroid, and nebula out of absolutely nothing. Far from being a one-time act, his power is currently active in the hearts of all six billion people on earth right now. Romans 1 explains that he makes plain to people the fact that creation came from God; that would be God's power actively giving people comprehension. When you read the Bible, that's God's power enabling you to understand complicated spiritual things. Colossians 1 even says that in him, all things hold together. He is actively spending his power, even now, to hold every molecule on earth together, and if he were to stop, everything that exists would blow itself apart from centrifugal force and the failure of the bonds in the atoms. He holds everything together, because he's God, and he's just that powerful. In the future, in addition to holding together the new heaven and the new earth, he's going to be feeding us a constant stream of power, which is what will enable us to be wholly dependent on him instead of food for energy, him instead of sleep for rejuvenation, him instead of air for life, and so on. That is one of the ways we will glorify him in eternity: by being totally dependent on him.

So that's where the whole food angle comes from. Will we be able to eat it anyway? I think so, because if God puts pear trees in the new earth, eating and enjoying his pears will be another way of glorifying him, won't it? Much in the same way that he gets glory when I marvel at the night sky or the lightning, so he gets glory when I enjoy the scent of flowers and the taste of food. I don't know if eating is one of the ways he will allow us to glorify him in the new earth, but I would not be surprised if it was. This is doubly true because eating now is just another exercise in selfishness. It's something I have to do so that my body won't self-destruct. In eternity, it will be totally selfless, done not because we have to but because we want to sample the wonderful things God has given us to eat.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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